Lady Clara, the fan-favorite character
from Loretta Chase’s New York Times and USA Today bestselling Dressmakers
series, finally gets her own happily ever after!

Convenient marriages are rarely
so…exciting. Can society’s most adored heiress and London’s most difficult
bachelor fall victim to their own unruly desires?

Biweekly
marriage proposals from men who can’t see beyond her (admittedly breathtaking)
looks are starting to get on Lady Clara Fairfax’s nerves. Desperate to be
something more than ornamental, she escapes to her favorite charity. When a
child goes missing, she turns to Oliver Radford—a handsome, brilliant,
excessively conceited barrister.

Having
unexpectedly found himself in line to inherit a dukedom, Radford needs a bride
who can navigate the Society he’s never been part of. If he can find one
without having to set foot in a ballroom, so much the better. Clara—blonde,
blue-eyed, and he must admit, not entirely bereft of brains—will do. As long as
he can woo her, wed her—and not, like every other sapskull in London, lose his
head over her…

“My lady?”

Clara looked up. Her lady’s maid, Davis, had been standing in the corridor by the door during the marriage proposal. Though the door stood open, though any number of large footmen lurked in Warford House’s corridors, and though none of Clara’s infatuated swains would dream of uttering a cross word to her, let alone attempt to harm her, Davis remained ever vigilant. People said Davis looked like a bulldog, but looks, Clara very well knew, weren’t everything. Not many years older than her charge, Davis had been hired immediately after one of

Clara’s many childhood contretemps, this time at Vauxhall. She protected Clara from fractures, concussions, drowning, and—most important to Mama—Clara’s becoming A Complete Hoyden.

“Where is Mama?”

Her mother usually entered close on the heels of rejected swains to wonder Where She’d Gone Wrong with her eldest daughter.

“Her ladyship is in bed with a sick headache,” Davis said.

This was probably because she’d had a visit earlier from her poisonous friend Lady Bartham.

“Let’s go out,” Clara said.

“Yes, my lady.”

“To the girls,” Clara said. A visit to the Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females would give her a chance to do some good instead of brooding about men. “Please order my cabriolet.”

Clara drove herself whenever possible, partly to reduce servants’ spying and tattling, but mainly to feel she was in command of something, even if it was one horse pulling a small, two-wheeled vehicle. At least it was a dashing vehicle. Her eldest brother, Harry, the Earl of Longmore, had bought it for her.

“We’ll stop on the way and buy some trinkets for the girls.” She glanced down at herself. “But I can’t go in this. They must see me in my finest finery.”

When a proposal could not be avoided, she dressed as unflatteringly as she dared, to make her rejection sting less.

The girls were another matter. The Milliners’ Society’s founders were London’s premier modistes, the proprietresses of Maison Noirot. They made Lady Clara’s clothes, and they had taught her that dress was a form of art and a form of manipulation and a language in itself.

Twice they had saved her from what would have been catastrophic marriages.

Loretta Chase has worked in academe,
retail, and the visual arts, as well as on the streets-as a meter maid-and in
video, as a scriptwriter. She might have developed an excitingly checkered
career had her spouse not nagged her into writing fiction. Her bestselling
historical romances, set in the Regency and Romantic eras of the early 19th
century, have won a number of awards, including the Romance Writers of
America’s Rita. For more about her past, her books, and what she does and
doesn’t do on social media, please visit her website www.LorettaChase.com.